As the flood of images, audio, and horror stories of children ripped from their parents and detained at the U.S. border grows thicker, it seems Donald Trump’s White House may be starting to realize, on some level, that it’s dealing with a P.R. crisis. Several Republican senators, including Utah’s Orrin Hatch, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and Arizona’s John McCain, have now spoken out against the child separation policy. More than 80 former U.S. attorneys have signed a letter denouncing it. Every living First Lady has now declared her opposition. Ivanka Trump, a supposed White House advocate for women’s issues, is being harangued for her silence. Yet White House sources have reportedly indicated that Trump will stand firm. And so, Trump allies are employing a tactic they’ve long used to obfuscate, evade, and blame-shift: they’re falling back on semantics.

The latest to engage in this round of verbal jiujitsu is Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who initially justified his “zero-tolerance” policy with a quote from the Bible. On Monday, speaking to Fox host Laura Ingraham, he was asked to respond to comparisons between the policy and deeds carried out by German Nazis. “What’s going on here?” Ingraham wondered aloud. “Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course,” Sessions replied. “In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country.” (This isn’t strictly true; the Nazis initially explored expelling all Jews from Europe, to the extent that they forcibly deported thousands from Poland.) “This is,” Sessions conceded, “a serious matter . . . we need to think it through—be rational and thoughtful about it,” he continued. “We want to allow asylum for people who qualify for it, but people who want economic migration for their personal financial benefit, and what they think is their family’s benefit, is not a basis for a claim of asylum—but they can make that claim, we will process it, and I will review the situation and make a decision.”

Sessions’s script-flipping was supplemented by Ingraham herself, who fractured the limits of exaggeration when she compared the bare-bones detention centers to sleepaway camps. “More kids are being separated from their parents and temporarily housed in what are essentially summer camps, or as the San Diego Union-Tribune described them today, as basically looking like boarding schools,” she declared, eschewing vital aspects of the newspaper’s report, which described the facilities’ chain-link fencing, privacy netting, and 24-hour video surveillance. “The American people are footing a really big bill for what is tantamount to a slow-rolling invasion of the United States.” (She later amended her description: “Apparently there are a lot of people very upset because we referred to some of the detention facilities tonight as essentially like summer camps,” she said. “The San Diego Union-Tribune today described the facilities as essentially like what you would expect at a boarding school. So I will stick to there are some of them like boarding schools. And I suggest that a lot of the folks who are worried about that spend more time in Central America. I have.”)

The Trump administration itself added another useful data point to the Nazi-camp (or, O.K., boarding school) continuum on Monday evening, when The Washington Postreported that Trump officials “rejected” former First Lady Laura Bush’sparallel between the border holding centers and World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps. In a hefty document entitled “Congressional Democrats’ Policies Are Responsible for the Border Crisis and Family Separation,” the White House specifically directed its advocates to counter reports that children were mistreated, calling them “bunk.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen likewise doubled down on semantics during a contentious press conference on Monday. “Are you intending for this to play out as it is playing out?” a reporter asked. “Are you intending for parents to be separated from their children? Are you intending to send a message?” Nielsen’s reply:

No. Because why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that?

She then claimed not to have seen photos of children being held in detention centers, despite their prominence in national news. “I think that they reflect the focus of those who post such pictures and narratives,” she argued. “The narratives we don’t see are the narratives of the crime, of the opioids, of the smugglers, of people who are killed by gang members, of American children who are recruited and, then, when they lose the drugs, they’re tased and beaten.”

This sort of rhetorical sparring isn’t unique to the Trump administration, but somehow, Trump seems to have catapulted the game to new heights of absurdity. The frame of mind required for Sessions to defend the policy as better than Nazis is the same one employed by Fox host Steve Doocy, who said on-air that the “cages” where children are housed are more like “walls out of chain-link fences.” (Border Patrol later chimed in, saying it was equally “uncomfortable” with the use of the word “cages.”) Confident, as hard-liner Stephen Millerboasts, that it can’t lose on immigration, Trumpworld is battling accusations of atrocity with the type of spin made famous by the likes of Kellyanne Conway—spin so ridiculous that it immobilizes opponents in paroxysms of incredulous hysteria. Spin so ridiculous that it reads, to Trump’s base, as plausible.